What do "they" want? What are "they" buying?
When you come back from a couple of days off and it isn't clear what the answer is, you have to conclude that "they" don't really have a clue -- but they feel they should be buying "something" because "they" don't want to be left behind, even if they can't figure out what they should be buying.
To wit: When you have +4% GDP growth, it means you have to be buying industrials and you have to be buying any with lots of export power.
However, you are concerned about the fluidity of our relationships with our trading partners. It's very clear that things are better, with Europe as of last week's trade summit. But the NXP Semi (NXPI) bust makes buying international tech industrials fraught.
So, you cluster around a couple of industrials with broad sweep and you buy those -- hence the love for Ingersoll-Rand (IR) , Honeywell (HON) and United Technologies (UTX) .
But tech itself? The one-two punch of Facebook (FB) and Twitter (TWTR) -- obviously the former is the true hammer -- plus the margin compression in components, makes the segment too dangerous for many. "They" have to "thread the needle" -- and buying Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and selling Intel (INTC) doesn't come that easy.
The banks seem like an easy call, with rates going higher. BUT are they as easy a call as when you have to sell them when rates went lower. Wasn't the time to be enthusiastic when they reported these same numbers we took them up on and they were hated?
No one owns healthcare with a 4% GDP. But then again, how do you explain the love for Eli Lilly (LLY) , for Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) , for Pfizer (PFE) ?
So you just go with the transports? The airlines now that capacity is coming out?
It's harder than it seems on the surface, for certain, because "they" are flying blind.
And "they" are still dazed from Facebook, even with Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOGL) defying gravity.
